> Another example of excessive greed ruining a good thing. As you say, > newspapers were at a stable place between expenses and revenues. > Owners made a reasonable living. The greedy conglomerates wanted more > and didn't care about the long-term consequences of their short-term > greed. They started to cut and for every dollar they cut they lost > over a dollar in revenue. The math is inescapable.
I think Tom has hit on it. It's not that the business model is failing and that consumers are divesting themselves of archaic information delivery methods and using other means of gathering information now, but that business owners wanted to see their investments fail and not make a positive return. It's all very simple: greedy capitalists want to lose money. > PS: The Petersburg Times is owned by the Pointer Institute, a non- > profit that specializes in journalism. They are now in the process of > selling off Congressional Quarterly. I wonder what that is about. I wonder if it's that even non-profits have to obey the laws of supply and demand? > News for the well off and no news for the rest of the population? You seem to think that's a fine idea for Newsweek. > I think advertising supported models can > work. Then, why don't they? > But running an online news service using the same model as a > paper-based publication is not a good fit. They need to figure out > how to work with the new medium. Compare to the growing pains of the > early days of radio or television. In the beginning people did not > know what to do about those mediums too. Companies that started out online seem to understand this, but the dinosaurs of the print media are baffled by this medium. Only the wall Street Journal has managed to make money on their online product. Old print media companies keep wanting to enforce the old gatekeeper role on the consumer, when the consumer has already told them to stuff it. WaPo keeps wanting me to register for their online version and I keep telling them via bugmenot that I have no interest in doing so. They don't seem to be listening. Maybe I should just give them bad data instead. Ars Technica is a good example. I remember when they were a smallish site for geeks in the late 90s, but are now owned by Conde Nast. The advertising only model didn't work well enough for them to cover costs, so they started charging a small annual fee for certain information. It worked well enough to keep them afloat and also to make them a viable enough purchase for an old media company that is figuring out how to work the new media. Not to worry though, the left has it all figured out how to "save" newspapers: just make them wards of the state. What could possibly go wrong? ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
